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mego42 · 3 years

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OK but!!! Come over here and randomly sink the 8 ball???? Can we talk about this???? Does rio not understand how the game of pool works??? Was he just hanging out playing against himself prior to this??? Is it a metaphor??? Is 8 the only number he knows???? THOUGHTS????

the fact that we open the scene with a center shot of beth, all bambi-eyes and openly???? letting him see???? her vulnerable????????

the fact that she still sees him as a lifeline and turns to him for help in spite of him being demonstrably useless literally every time she’s asked

the fact that he’s open to it and asks what she needs

aaaaaand then shuts her down when she says it’s for dean

but also is still giving her some p solid, if, you know, a touch sociopathic advice

and then the fact that said advice more or less amounts to please let your ~technical husband rot in jail crime wife

and yes, the fact that he is, apparently just hanging out! in his own bar! after hours! alone! playing pool with himself!

which sounds like it should be a euphemism tbh but no! it is entirely literal!

everyone involved in this show is a lunatic including all of us!

i love it!

literally wtf are you doing rio

i would like to point out he is losing to himself which is fucking hysterical

and also extremely apt, tbh

he climbs up the pool cue when he stands. why. to what purpose.

he told her to be smart before he murdered her co-worker and beth’s like, not even phased at all by that reference

i am teLlinG y’alL murder is their foreplay, the hitman thing’s gonna be fine

if anything he’s gonna be hurt she outsourced it

which, valid!!!!!!

why are his fingers so long why why WHY

every time he lines up and takes a shot i make this sort of garbled hairpin in a vacuum cleaner noise

i didn’t ask to be like this

and when he sees that the please let him rot please please please pitch is not helping beth’s stress level he pivots and like, actually tries to be comforting????????

but is also incredibly bad at it

remember when beth was like my husband took my children and rio was like that sucks, here’s an open tab byyyyyyeeeeee

he is not the best shoulder, is what i’m saying

and yet!! she keeps going to him anyway!!!!

he’s like SIVER LINING MAYBE YOU’LL WANT TO FUCK YOUR HUSBAND AGAIN AND BETH JUST STEAMROLLS RIGHT PAST THAT

it like doesn’t even register

fuck that guy? don’t be absurd crime husband

also like

who exactly might want to hit what again hmmmmmmm HMMMMMMMMMMM

i am just saying it feels like there are some layErs here

he is so satisfied when she points out nothing sticks to him i want to slap him i want to slap myself i want to slap everyone

i gOt lucK oN my siDe / mayBe yoU do tOo

smells like foreshadowing in here

also jumping back the way his smile s o f t e n s when he says maybe you do too

the urge to slap remains strong but now with a side of leave mE here tO diE

(bringing back @pynkhues tag meanderings bc it lives in my head now, is this rio’s way of saying he can protect her class please discuss)

and now we arrive at sink the eight ball

i know it’s ridiculous i know but i can’t help it they’re standing there with a the pool cue and the pool table and it’s all weird tangled intimacy that’s about to flip over into intense sexual tension and i am not coping well with this at all

i’m not okay

THE WAY HE PULLS THE CUE AWAY

AND THE WAY SHE’S LIKE THIS MOTHERFUCKER I STG

let beth boland unhinge her jaw and devour the world 2k21 she deserves it

idk what to tell you beth you like it

like let’s pause for a sec and examine the situation shall we? this ep provides some really interesting contrast between beth’s extremely different relationships with the men in her life.

1. we have dean who is, i would argue, shown throughout the ep to be a complete albatross of guilt and long expired, turned toxic gratitude dangling from a rapidly fraying thread called parenting. he’s furious with beth to the point of not wanting to see her while in prison, choosing to stay in prison to avoid coping with how thoroughly their house of cards is tumbling down and the reality of who beth is and who they are to each other that collapse is exposing. 2. we have fitzpatrick who repeatedly tramples her boundaries in a tunnel vision pursuit of the person he thinks she is and his fantasy of the relationship he could have with this person who doesn’t actually exist and we’ve seen how uncomfortable it makes beth to the point that she finally blows up at him, reasserting who she is and it, idk if i would say scares him, but it definitely turns him off. 3. and then we have rio who she is locked in a nightmare game of cat and mouse with, who she has convinced herself is the source of all of her problems and yet when push comes to shove is still the person that she turns to for guidance and support, who she has no objection to sharing physical space with (i hear rumors the pool scene reads wildly divide and yeah i can see how but i am firmly camp they are both experiencing some stupidly complicated emotional upheaval and that’s what that face is, y’all take it how you will), who is also the only person this ep to witness the single, genuine, uncomplicatedly happy glimpse of one elizabeth boland née marks (who can’t help but grin in response to her joy and honestly who wouldn’t she is so gd cUte before he rips the rug out from underneath her)

i got worked up and forgot where i was going with this

something about contrast

but also the like, comfort and familiarity and ease even when Extremely Annoyed

idk i just think it’s neat

let’s see what else happens

oh right they play """"""""""pool"""""""""""

wait no, we’re not there yet

first rio’s gotta do that big-eyed disney princess look he shoots beth’s way from time to time, 209 being the notable example that comes to mind

h E Lp

so now we’re at sinking the eight ball

yeah, no, he does not know how pool works

i’d say it’s embarrassing but what isn’t with them

SPEAKING OF EMBARRASSING

or maybe i mean inexplicable

i tried to be v hardcore on not letting myself speculate about the pool scene and how it would come to be so sexy bc speculation has only ever led to either disappointment or me getting really, really over the top competitive about it to the point where it isn’t even fun for me anymore (which is saying something) but i couldn’t help spinning out potential scenarios bc like why???? how????? the man is draped over her like a blanket and smELliNg heR haiR surely that doesn’t just happen??????

WHAT A FOOL I WAS

LITERALLY FOR NO REASON AT ALL RIO’S LIKE FUCK YOUR PERSONAL SPACE CRIME WIFE IT’S OUR PERSONAL SPACE

AND BETH’S JUST LIKE YEAH SURE CRIME HUSBAND THIS IS FINE AND NORMAL I HAVE NO FURTHER COMMENTARY

LIKE?????????????????????????????????????????

h An dS

hAn D S

H a nD s

anD theN hE smelLs heR hAir like a fuckiN lunAtic

i just

TO WHAT PURPOSE

SCIENCE P L E A S E E X P L A I N

i know we all like to argue until the cows come home over what specific flavor of sloppy the show is and then we argue with the cows but like

this didn’t happen out of nowhere

they’re setting something up

(they fuckin’)

(do not argue with me or my cows)

thE shoUldeR roLl

no thoughts just that

AND THEN SHE MAKES IT

(and everything b o u n c e s)

AND SHE’S SO CUTE????? MY WIFE???????? I LOVE HER????????????

no but literally when was the last time beth was that happy

it’s so pure

and it makes him lauGh toO

s Of t

and then rio’s like no but seriously fuck your husband let him rot in jail and beth’s facce falls and my heart breaks and everyone remembers everything is terrible bc they are absolutely inFURIATING nigHTMARE PEOPLE who caNNOT USE THEIR WORDs

what was the actual question here i don’t even remember

oh right why the eight ball

probs bc it color coordinated with both his and beth’s outfits bc he is A Heaux Like That

#this got entirely away from me #i am not sorry #I LIVE HERE NOW #beth x rio #nbc good girls #see the thing about the pool scene is there was no way i was going to be disappointed #and lo i was not #gg 4x03 #gg spoilers #i guess #long post #whoops

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doumekichikara · 7 years

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bodyswap! 👯‍♂️👫👬👭

[put a fanfic trope in my inbox and i’ll describe the fic i’d write!]

i am in fact heavily into a bodyswap au for damen and laurent that i unfortunately am never going to write but i’ll describe it in detail for you now! for 2,500 words, in fact!

note that it’s inspired in part by kimi no na wa (your name) so if you don’t want spoilers for that movie then don’t read this,

laurent and damen realize they’re swapping bodies a couple of days into it, after initially thinking they must be having incredibly, inexplicably realistic dreams. what is happening is impossible and cannot be real. but then damen sees, in a handwriting that is not his own, too neat, almost as if the writer is not used to writing in akielon and had to compose the message quite slowly and carefully, a note left in his bed: is this real?

laurent, waking in damen’s body the following day, finds a message in veretian, written below his own and tucked away in the same place: it must be.

through notes, and then longer letters, they piece it together. they’re alternating days. the switch happens as they sleep. laurent tries staying awake to prevent it, but all it does is delay it by a day. (he files this away in case there’s a day he knows he wants to be in his own body for.) when damen wakes up in his own body for two consecutive days and finds out how, he tries it too and is also able to delay it, and it doesn’t happen when he takes a nap that afternoon either; they both have to be asleep. laurent counts back the days and realizes it must have started at the six-year anniversary of the battle at marlas, but that is not something he wants to discuss with damen without a sword in his hand and damen in front of him, and so he never mentions it.

the problem is: in damen’s body, living damen’s life, it is very hard to imagine fighting him to the death. the first weeks, it sickens him to feel all these worshipful eyes on damianos, to see people prostrate themselves for him, to be served by slaves and to have to refuse the services that are so commonplace as to be assumed if he doesn’t give some reason he wants his bed to himself that night. and it is confusing, at times distressingly so, to move through customs and behaviors he’s only ever read about, and to do so in a body that he can feel so much power in, one he handles with lumbering awkwardness, forgetting his height and the mass of his limbs. he comes back to his body and he feels very light, too quick, not nearly solid enough.

but damianos is—thoughtful. damianos glosses akielon words in veretian where he can and leaves little phrases he thinks might come in handy, far more conversational than anything laurent included in his own guide to passing as himself. he writes suggestions for areas laurent might like to work on the next time he spars with jord, accurate to laurent’s weaknesses without having ever seen him fight, only from being in his skin. he catches onto laurent’s unwillingness to make the same use of slaves as he does and does something, during one of their days in their correct bodies, that leads to laurent never again finding himself having to work a way out of a slave coming to his (damianos’s) bed.

he slowly transforms the messages from warnings and rules to anecdotes about what he did that day, things laurent doesn’t need to know, but that he seems to want to tell him anyway. and laurent starts to do the same, almost like a diary, or a friend.

meanwhile damen has become…very taken with laurent, or what he has gathered about what laurent must be like. his messages are utilitarian at first, and from the way he spends his days (or the way damen does while he’s him) he doesn’t seem to interact with anyone any more than he has to. he has minimal interaction with the court, which baffles damen because it is so far removed from everything he has learned from his father about being a future king, and laurent is supposed to rule in just two more years. it occurs to him that laurent may be keeping him away from the court in order to keep him from learning anything sensitive, since he’s an enemy and could use that information against him—that’s the way veretians think, isn’t it? (it would never work, since memories of laurent’s life are fuzzy each time he returns to his own; it’s the written record at each end that refreshes it each time, and that never makes it to the other side.) all he can say for sure about laurent, initially, is that he’s incredibly beautiful and probably incredibly intelligent, if the reading material in his bedroom and the way he writes are anything to go by.

and then he spars with jord, and he learns that laurent works much, much harder than he wants anyone to know, and that he has the absolute loyalty of his men, good men, and that it is deserved. laurent does not have the physical strength that damen does but he has honed his body well, and for a long time, and from how jord responds both during and afterwards damen can tell that laurent knows how to move in his body much better than damen can, and that damen can only begin to imagine what laurent could do with himself.

(he has a similar realization the first time he-as-laurent goes riding.)

and then laurent starts to write back for real, no longer the spare, efficient messages but actual responses to damen, and damen learns that he is funny in a way that can cut but also has a warmth to it. that he’s far more observant than damen, so much so that damen starts to realize just how much slips by him simply because it hadn’t occurred to him it could be important. that he is fair, and kind, and perhaps also very lonely. that he couldn’t have asked for a better person to be stuck in this surreal situation with.

some days he imagines going to vere to meet him, to share the same time and space instead of always being alone and always delayed a day. he wonders whether that’s what they’re supposed to do, if maybe that’s why this is all happening—they’re meant to find common ground, come up with a way to move past this uneasy truce between their countries and form a real alliance. he considers writing laurent a letter and sending it off to arles, and then feels silly because they already do that every day, and what is he expecting to happen? (and on some days, when he can’t stop himself, he wonders if there might be an end to the switching, if the way to stop is to meet, to kiss—)

laurent, meanwhile, has accepted border duty, even knowing his uncle means to engineer a way to kill him, because he too has started to wonder, and he thinks there may be a way to make a friend of akielos. the day he leaves for the border, he sends a letter to damen, a real one; leaving arles means leaving behind the place he’s been hiding their messages, and he’s not sure when he’ll next have a safe place to leave new ones.

the next day, laurent wakes up in his own body.

he thinks that damen must have had to stay up late, for some reason, or woke so early that there was no overlap, seeing as laurent went to sleep quite late. but there’s no switch the next day, either. or the next. he moves towards the border without a single day in ios. and without a reply to his letter.

when he reaches the border after two weeks, he writes to jokaste. they got along well when he was in damen’s body; damen always scolded him for it afterwards, but she was the only one he’d ever let himself act at all like himself with, when he was damen. he thinks that if he is going to chance a letter to anyone else in the akielon court, it has to be her.

and this is how he learns that damen has been dead for a year.

and this is where the reader would remember that laurent had thought it was six years since marlas, had turned twenty, while damen had thought it would be two years until a nineteen-year-old laurent could rule. that jokaste had tried to warn laurent-as-damen but had referenced things only damen himself would understand, and laurent hadn’t written any of it down, so he didn’t remember and damen never knew. that for a month damen had been coughing, had been tiring more easily, but had pushed it aside so well it didn’t seem important.

for this au, both theomedes and damen were poisoned as part of the regent’s plan with kastor, and damen accidentally died too soon, too soon for it to be believable, before theomedes and before enough word had gotten out about him being sick for it to seem like it had been of natural causes. the alternate plan became to keep it quiet that he’d already died and wait for long enough that it seemed plausible it was natural. the story was that he was ill, and even the story didn’t make it to laurent because it barely left ios; the health and vitality of their royals is a point of pride and to have the king and crown prince both ill wasn’t a vulnerability the kyroi wanted to share openly with neighboring countries. by the time it became more public knowledge laurent was swapping with damen and believed his firsthand knowledge over quiet rumors, and was also very distracted with the whole swapping situation in general.

so: laurent learns the truth from jokaste, who tells him the truth because by this point (pg in the canon timeline) the regent is starting to move forward with his plans and jokaste is sure something like what happened to damen is going to happen again, and she couldn’t save him but maybe she can help laurent. laurent, meanwhile, is very fixated on the fact that this all started on the anniversary of marlas, and while part of him thinks maybe this has all been some kind of delusion borne of his obsession with damianos and his approaching 21st birthday i.e. expiration date, he thinks it must have been real. that was not the damen he would have conjured from his own mind.

so he rides alone to marlas from the border, and he goes to the artesian ruins. and in his letters with damen they talked about artes, and how it was once a single kingdom, and all of the ways those connections are still present, underlying their foundations. and during the months they were alternating bodies, there was a time that laurent-as-damen went to marlas and left something of damen’s there—a sword? a shield?—on the site where auguste died. laurent returns there, now as himself, and he considers how backwards this all is: he came to remember auguste, wearing auguste’s killer’s body, and now here he is in his own body, desperately seeking his brother’s killer.

while he’s there, he falls on the uneven ground and hits his head. when he wakes, he’s in damen’s living, breathing body once again.

what follows is an Exciting Ride, in which laurent desperately tries to ensure damen lives, talking to jokaste about the poison plot, riding to delpha alone to see nikandros (who has def been present already in the story, warning damen-as-damen just like jokaste warned laurent-as-damen, and also the time laurent went to marlas was during a trip damen made to delpha) to set things in motion as far as having an anti-kastor faction amongst the kyroi. after he’s talked to nikandros he has a very strong instinct that he needs to go to the ruins, that he’ll be able to see damen there—

and he does, somehow. he goes to where his body had been when he left it (over a year from now?) and he calls for damen and hears damen call him back—damen in laurent’s own voice, saying his name, as he calls damen’s with damen's—and then somehow, incredibly, damen is there, or he is there, over a year from now but somehow in a shared time and place, and then he is himself, and looking up at damen, damen who is so very large and right there in front of him for the first time.

“you died,” laurent says, “how could you let that happen, you absolute moron—”

damen doesn’t hear any of this because laurent is so much more beautiful in front of him, in front of him and not in a mirror, laurent found a way to him, even though damen remembers when he collapsed—"can i?“ damen asks, reaching out.

he embraces him. laurent has not been touched, not like this, not in so long, but he embraces damen, there where damen killed auguste, and he feels a relief he hasn’t felt since that happened, and it doesn’t make any sense but he doesn’t want to let it go.

they are holding onto each other as laurent tells him everything he needs to know, tells him to remember all of it, his life literally depends on it, there will be more attempts, don’t you dare die, and damen tells him he won’t, he won’t, and laurent had better not either—

the moment ends. laurent stands alone, on the ruins.

he can’t remember why he came. he was looking for someone. for something? he looks around and feels an echo of relief and doesn’t know why.

(over a year ago, damen remembers what laurent told him, remembers what he needs to do. he doesn’t die, he won’t, he promised someone…

who?)

laurent can’t remember why he went to marlas, and he goes back to where he was stationed on the border in a sort of haze, feeling both emptied, as though something very important is missing, and more full and real than he has in a long time.

laurent can’t remember why he sent the letters to damianos or jokaste, but he did, and that’s what matters. that’s how the correspondence that changes everything begins. how he is able to bring together his uncle’s plots and the thwarted poison plot on the akielon royal family, the mastermind of which still hasn’t yet been identified. how he arranges to meet formally with the akielon crown prince and sees him in the flesh for the first time.

but—it doesn’t feel like the first time at all, and as laurent studies damianos’s face he thinks he sees something familiar in it, something he feels but can’t name. a sort of nostalgia, missing something he shouldn’t be able to miss. as they look at each other, the eye contact feels intimate, and strangely laurent doesn’t want to pull away from that.

“is this…?” damianos—damen asks.

“it must be,” laurent says.

#captive prince #the short version of what would be a roughly 80k fic...which is why i can't write it #artemisrisen #answered #marina writes

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